We have reached that time of year when the lists start coming down in buckets. We are here to contribute to the torrential downpour. We do lists a little differently at Bandcamp: No ranking. Today we highlight more albums we think you should check out, in alphabetical order. Then, on Friday, we unveil the best of the best, our Essential Albums of 2025. Not enough lists for ya? Next week, our genre columnists will weigh in with their picks for the year’s best records. So many lists! So little time! Listomania, some might say. Not me, but some.
December 3: The Best Albums of 2025: A–L
December 4: The Best Albums of 2025: M–Z
December 5: 2025’s Essential Releases
MC Yallah & Debmaster
Gaudencia
Vinyl LP
Frequent collaborators MC Yallah and Debmaster reunite here with even less regard for genre boundaries than ever before. “Watch me,” MC Yallah purrs, unhurried and measured, on “Lioness”; it’s a simple statement that demonstrates their confidence on this pack-a-punch, multilingual album. Singing and ad-libbing in English, Luganda, Luo, and Kiswahili, the Kenyan rapper flaunts vocal dexterity, her voice interweaving perfectly with Debmaster’s dark, foreboding production. Gaudencia darts between dub, industrial, dancehall, and hip-hop with warped, re-pitched instrumentation. Twenty-five years after beginning her career on the East African live circuit, MC Yallah has never sounded so sure of herself.
–Tina Edwards
Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas
Totality
Vinyl LP, Cassette
Chicago experimentalists Bitchin Bajas and Natural Information Society have each spent about 15 years as mixologists-in-arms, juggling free improv, ambient electronics, modal jazz, minimalism, international influences, and more. Their second collaborative album in a decade is a prismatic experience, laden with musical trompe l’oeil effects in the form of trippy dub textures and whirling-dervish jazz figures, with layered arrangements that present differently depending on the listener’s perspective. The result is a radiant brew—with alien undertones.
–Jim Allen
Read our Album of the Day on Totality.
Oklou
choke enough
Vinyl LP, Cassette, Vinyl, Compact Disc (CD)
The Necks
Disquiet
Compact Disc (CD)
For nearly 40 years, time has seemed to cede its usual order for The Necks. At their best, Chris Abrahams, Tony Buck, and Lloyd Swanton not only enter a trance, but also pull anyone within earshot inside, too, as little pieces of piano, drums, and bass come together into a mesmeric whole. Disquiet—their 20th album, three hours of intricate sound split across four tracks—might actually be their best, especially “Causeway.” It begins as an instrumental fantasy, like Talk Talk sailing into deeper space, until Buck splits it open, his artillery-grade drums pushing everyone out of their slipstream. Before you notice, they have reached the clear denouement, a swirling drone that suggests an acid flashback. Nearly 30 minutes gone in a blink.
–Grayson Haver Currin
No Joy
Bugland
Vinyl LP
Whatever your (possibly misplaced) nostalgia, No Joy’s Bugland has something for you. If you’re someone who feels sorry about missing out on ‘90s London, there’s the elation of early Blur and a sprinkling of Stone Roses in album opener “Garbage Dream House.” Other critics have correctly pointed out Jasamine White-Gluz’s raiding of Ray of Light-era Madonna, Garbage, My Bloody Valentine—the list goes on for this delightful, gaze-y record that’s influence-promiscuous without ever feeling overstuffed. That’s a fine line, as is the one walked by producer Fire-Toolz in designing a sound that envelops the listener without drowning them. And hell, even if it did, there would be worse ways to go.
–Elle Carroll
Ian Nyquist
Gilded
Cassette
As the decades have passed, the intersections between Ireland’s living musical tradition and electronic song forms have focused on the arrival of the new. What brings Dublin producer and bodhránaí Ian Nyquist’s album Gilded to the forefront of the current moment is inversion: The Irish frame-drum, the heartbeat of the contemporary tradition, is the controller, not the sample, recorded in its natural state and reshaped, recast, and reimagined at the heart of traditional and original compositions alike. Acting as a primer, Nyquist’s rhythms range from the long-held fundamentals, such as reel and jig; to the underpinnings of musical rebirth, such as Cork canúnaí (singer) Lorcan Mac Máthúna’s wavering rendition of “Úna Bhán,” and Dublin-based singer and songwriter Iona Zajac’s take on Gaelic rowing song “Leis a’ Bháta,” at once held steady and cast into the tumult of its muse. Nyquist’s production is exploratory, and his own performance serves that purpose, a sensitivity that hopefully sets the tone for those that sail after him.
–Mike McGrath-Bryan
Palm Springs
Turning Yr Back on the Dolphin
Vinyl LP
It’s a good time to be an outsider folk artist, with some of the year’s best albums built from bare moods and voice alone. Melbourne singer-songwriter Erica Dunn, who plays guitar and sings in the rowdy rock groups Tropical Fuck Storm and Mod Con, delivers on her folkier side hustle with a distinctive album that explores her more reflective side. Turning Yr Back on the Dolphin opens with a whisper and closes with a bar-room piano pootle straight out of Laurel Canyon: “Parthenon Baby” and “Your Ashes, My Tree” trek the Sylvan balladry route, ornamented with flute. But Dunn brings it back down to Earth again on “Waiting for the Gate,” admitting she’s “tired of drinking through her weekends” and revealing yet another piece of herself to us.
–April Clare Welsh
Evan Parker & Bill Nace
Branches
Vinyl LP
Listening to this collaboration between UK avant/improv elder statesman Evan Parker on sax and American underground hound Bill Nace on taishogoto (sort of an electric Japanese hurdy gurdy), you’d swear you weren’t listening to music, but rather a swarm of bees swirling and buzzing continuously for 40 minutes straight. As if the stamina displayed across the duo’s assault weren’t impressive enough, the maniacal intensity of their maximal minimalism generates a rarefied thrill, like blowing up a Marshall amp stack and riding the reverberations from here to heaven.
–Jim Allen
pôt-pot
Warsaw 480km
Vinyl LP
Despite pôt-pot’s members being split between Ireland and Portugal, the chemistry driving Warsaw 480km’s tight 39-minute runtime demonstrates how distance can, in some cases, bring a band closer together. The quintet masterfully take the motorik beats and slinky bass grooves of kraut and psych rock and elevate them with harmonium drones and haunting vocal interplay (affectingly captured on highlight “Sextape”). Echoes of The Jesus and Mary Chain are felt on “I AM!” and “Hot Scene,” but it’s Lou Reed’s influence that’s strongly audible in lead songwriter and singing-drummer Mark Waldron-Hyden’s quietly assured vocal performances, as he delivers economical lyrics rooted in grief while also striving towards personal betterment, a contrast which leaves him wondering, “How can we get there?”
–Zara Hedderman
Read our Album of the Day on Warsaw 480km.
Joanne Robertson
Blurrr
Vinyl LP
Joanne Robertson’s been a consistent presence in British underground lo-fi rock since the early ‘10s, yet her sound world continues to expand, and Blurr feels like being inside of a breathing, living organism. Robertson’s words are only just about legible, her guitar-technique charmingly un-manicured, with the strings of the instrument reverberating briefly on the dissonant, passing notes. Cellist Oliver Coates accompanies the Glasgow-based singer-songwriter on side B only, cementing the quiet sense of grandeur that the first half of the album hints at. Between painting and raising her toddler, Robertson sculpted Blurr into a paragon of tranquility—something we could all do with a little more of right now.
–Tina Edwards
Rwake
The Return of Magik
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt, Sweater/Hoodie
In the Southern metal boomlet of the late ’00s, Arkansas’s Rwake seemed like the budding revelation. Their records channeled the sludge endemic to their peers through a twisting series of prog byways; they felt dangerous, too, like a more audacious iteration of Eyehategod. But just as they crested with Relapse, following two absorbing records, they vanished for 14 years until cutting the aptly named The Return of Magik. After so many bands of that moment either collapsed or took alienating careerist turns, it is affirming to hear Rwake not just reinvigorated but reinforced—by more finessed textures, by a sermon-like sample of Black Oak Arkansas’s Dandy Mangrum that both ties the band to its homeland and cuts them loose of its strictures, and by an enduring concept about searching for any salvation amid this world’s muck. Rwake disappeared in order to survive; their return now feels vengeful, timely, and welcome.
–Grayson Haver Currin
Salem 66
SALT
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt
Let’s hear it for Boston. Throwing Muses, Kim Deal, and The Lemonheads are touring new music; the city’s underground is being reinvigorated by localized festivals and resurrected venues. In many ways, 2025 primed the (re)discovery of the Massachusetts capital’s neglected MVPs: Salem 66, a rock band founded by three women at a time when that didn’t often happen. SALT (a preserver) charts their prolific six-year evolution from the clunky, coltish jangle of their debut 1984 EP through the incisive, confident writing on 1990’s Down the Primrose Path—its flange-dressed bluesy shredding and harmonized back-and-forths that forecasted the likes of Sleater-Kinney. Elisabeth Kaplan called the 10-track primer “a glimpse of a sliver of a sliver of history.” It connects dots in a way that feels far more significant.
–Hayden Merrick
Read our feature on Salem 66.
Sharp Pins
Radio DDR / Balloon Balloon Balloon
Cassette, Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Coming into 2025, 20-year-old Kai Slater had already earned certified wunderkind status by playing in one of America’s most promising young indie rock bands, Lifeguard, and publishing Chicago’s DIY teen-scene bible Hallogallo. But over the past year, the rest of the world got hip to what his Windy City peers have known for a while: Slater is also the most prolific and precise indie-pop tunesmith in the Midwest who isn’t named Robert Pollard (if Pollard were more interested in singing about puppy love than elves). Last March, K Records sub-label Perennial oversaw a reissue of Sharp Pins’s lovably lo-fi 2024 release Radio DDR that included a handful of new tracks, one of which—the scrappily anthemic ”I Can’t Stop”—could easily be adopted as his irrepressible mission statement: A mere eight months later, Slater delivered Balloon Balloon Balloon, a 21-song showcase of dreamy jangle, hallucinatory harmonies, and magical melodies that transform nonsensical phrases like “Popafangout” into divine scripture.
–Stuart Berman
Slikback
Attrition
Vinyl LP
Attrition—a great word to sum up 2025. Slikback has been feeling out the apocalypse with his doomsday music since the late ‘10s, but this record is a submission to the reality of attrition. Submitting by letting go, as heard on “Snow,” or by throwing fists on dance floors, as on “Sekli.” It’s one the densest and most deliberate works by Slikback, released on the UK’s tasteful Planet Mu, rather than the usual gunfire straight from his prolific home studio. As the “end of history” is unmasked and our institutions start to rot, at least we have Slikback and his heavy sound design to decorate the end of times.
–Christian Askin
Read our Album of the Day on Attrition.
Georgie Sweet
I Swear to You
2 x Vinyl LP, Vinyl LP
Georgie Sweet‘s second album, I Swear To You, combines musical adventurism with profound imagery. It may only be her own vocals layered on “All That We Were,” but as the different lines shift around and through one another, it’s almost as if the person she sings about missing appears, just out of reach. “Energy” is similar. Her heart-wrenching descriptions of her lost love’s presence and emotional effect materialize impressions and suggestions into clear form. In a year when the biggest album is the soundtrack for a movie about flashy demon hunters, Sweet’s talent for emotional visuals in similarly affecting music is more resonant than ever.
–Harry Levin
Lorien Testard
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Original Soundtrack)
Any game-of-the-year candidate must include an incredible soundtrack and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 delivers. The mammoth RPG from French developers Sandfall Interactive unsurprisingly features a mammoth soundtrack, with composer Lorien Testard writing over 150 songs, and featured singer Alice Duport-Percier lending her unforgettable voice to the most critical story moments. Despite the RPG being a traditionally Japanese creation, Clair Obscur’s Belle Époque setting and explicit nods to its most important figures like Erik Satie and Claude Debussy cement its unique place in video game soundtrack history.
–Eli Schoop
Read our feature on Lorien Testard.
Emma-Jean Thackray
Weirdo
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt, Poster/Print
The running trend in jazz over the past decade has been levity. Thundercat, JD & Domi, and now Emma-Jean Thackray have all infused the genre with a jokey irreverence that’s part comedy and part Jaco Pastorius/Herbie Hancock. On “Black Hole,” Thackray enlists fellow prestigious musical prankster Reggie Watts to suitably funky results. Weirdo is paradoxical in this sense, as Thackray is both meticulous and unconcerned with propriety. To respond to losing your partner with such a bouncy concoction is a testament to Thackray’s spirit and her resilience.
–Eli Schoop
Listen to an interview with Emma-Jean Thackray on Bandcamp Selects.
Throwing Shapes
Throwing Shapes
Vinyl LP
Méabh McKenna didn’t intend to play a wire-strung harp on Throwing Shapes’s debut album—on the day of recording, the band simply couldn’t fit a pedal harp into the studio. This turned out to be a bit of good luck for the group, as the Irish instrument’s bright, clean sound became essential to their style. It’s a sound steeped in history—the Brian Boru harp is the country’s national emblem—but the trio modernizes it with gorgeous, delicate live processing combined with Ross Chaney’s agile drumming and Gareth Quinn Redmond’s pastel synth washes. Throwing Shapes is a quietly triumphant first statement from a band who can take the traditional and make it new, who can take folk, jazz, and ambient and make them all their own.
–Matthew Blackwell
Read our Album of the Day on Throwing Shapes.
Tropical Fuck Storm
Fairyland Codex
Vinyl LP, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD), Bag
While gen pop heralds the return of Australia’s darling Tame Impala, Tropical Fuck Storm promulgates the Land Down Under’s storied and extensive rock scene with Fairyland Codex, smashing together death metal, surf, and retro. On Fairyland Codex, they draw from their eclectic backgrounds to create an intriguing and unpredictable musical world. The title track is an eerie yet dynamic spell being cast by a coven of debaucherous witches and wizards. “Dunning Kruger’s Loser Cruiser” is a boisterous, guitar-and-drum-driven revelry, with laughable, nonsensical lyrics elucidating that nothing in particular is being celebrated.
–Harry Levin
Read our Big Ups with Tropical F*ck Storm.
The Vernon Spring
Under a Familiar Sun
Vinyl LP
On Under A Familiar Sun, The Vernon Spring melds spoken word, field recordings, and muted piano into something frayed and weather-beaten, artfully distressed and beautiful. “Melds” really is the operative word here. Each piece is arranged like an intricate sculpture, with joins and edges and splinters. You can almost feel the rush and recede of white noise, the gauziness of the saturation, and the resonance of the ruminative spoken word pieces. The most important sonic calling card, though, is the clicky-clacky impact of the piano keys on strings, pitched somewhere between a gospel instrumental and something off Bon Iver’s 22, A Million or i, i. Indeed, it’s the likes of Bon Iver and Bon Iver’s extended universe (Dijon, Mk.gee, etc) that The Vernon Spring finds common cause. What we have here is a variety of deconstructed R&B, one that lies in parts—a drum break here, a crooned, lovelorn vocal line there—where good ol’ fashioned melodic sensibility meets experimental sound design. Somehow it all just works.
–Will Ainsley
Listen to an interview with Vernon Spring on Bandcamp Selects.
Wave Generators
RUN AWAY WITH A WILD AND A RARE ONE
Vinyl LP
One way to hear RUN AWAY WITH A WILD AND A RARE ONE is as a dirt-caked road movie—like Mad Max or Highway 61—with Nosaj and Height Keech gleefully burning rubber through a desolate landscape. This is an album to put on when you crave destruction, each overdriven guitar sample and blast of noise scorching your brain like the heat radiating from a sunbaked desert road. On “Phase 5,” they ride a locked groove that’s somewhere between psychedelic repetition and a record skipping on a broken turntable, while “Wildcat” repurposes ‘70s stoner riffs for Nosaj to rap over with a relentless, bellicose staccato. It’s hip-hop for the apocalypse chasers, each song careening towards the edge of a cliff.
–Dash Lewis
weed420
amor de encava
Weed420 got their name from a group chat they used to spam with weed-related .gifs and music from their native Venezuela; a homegrown—and incredibly online–brand of chaos immortalized on their excellent mor de encava LP. The trio’s latest, blends reggaeton, vaporwave, and IDM into deep-fried club music without borders; think the Avalanches by way of Los Thuthanaka and the Rate Your Music forums. From the uptempo sugar highs (“MALUCA”) to the digital odysseys (“el chiste más largo de la historia”), mor de encava brings the intersection between radio discovery, digital streaming, and YouTube samples to life.
–Dylan Green
Read our feature on weed420.
Wode
Uncrossing the Keys
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
Manchester’s Wode have leveled up by rocking out. Their fourth album, Uncrossing the Keys, regularly nods to Cathedral’s throbbing, full-bodied doom grooves and Iron Maiden’s flights of triple-guitar fancy. Fortunately, the band hasn’t forgotten black metal’s sense of ceremony. Uncrossing the Keys often feels devilishly ritualistic, much in the way Wode’s forebears in Watain still sounded ritualistic on their ultra-melodic crossover push, The Wild Hunt. Master of ceremonies M. Czerwoniuk is the right man for this job, lighting corridors of hellish darkness with smoldering lead guitar work, pulsing keys, and bugged-out vocals. He has precisely the kind of charisma that Wode needs to stand out from the glut of would-be black metal rock stars.
–Brad Sanders
Read our Album of the Day on Uncrossing the Keys.
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko
Гільдеґарда (Hildegard)
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
When a Russian missile hit near Heinali’s Kyiv studio, he experienced a holy dread. With his background in medieval music, he compared the explosion to the bursts of light that preceded the divine visions of 12th-century composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Гільдеґарда (Hildegard) uses the medieval saint’s music as a “distant mirror” to reflect the war in Ukraine. Across two 20-minute tracks, Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko sings in the Ukrainian avtentyka style, a folk tradition that was threatened by the Soviet state and today represents defiance of the Putin regime. Her powerful voice cries out over Heinali’s modular synth, which sounds alternately like bagpipes and drone metal. Hildegard combines the mystical and the modern, theology and technology, into a vision of hope for their war-torn country.
